“And I feel devilish glad to see you,” responded Jack Rily. “You may observe that my circumstances have improved a trifle or so, of late.”
“Ah! I wish to heaven that mine would show any proof of amendment,” said Green, with a profound sigh, as he helped himself to a tumbler of brandy-and-water. “I made a couple of hundred pounds the other day—it was an affair of giving information about a lunatic-asylum in which Heathcote had locked up his own brother;—and because I treated myself to this new suit of clothes,” he added, glancing down at his dress, “the old villain declared that I must have robbed him to procure the money. Oh! how I long to be revenged on that man!”
“Well, I don’t suppose it’s so very difficult,” observed Rily: “at least I should think, from all you have told me at different times, that you know enough about him to make him quake in his shoes.”
“Yes—yes—but—then,” stammered the clerk, with the hesitation of one who longs to open his heart to another, yet shrinks from the avowal of a villany even to the ears of a villain.
“But what?” demanded the Doctor, relighting his pipe. “If you’ve come to consult me, then out with everything at once. Do nothing by halves, old fellow—I never do.”
“Well, you see—the truth is—that—I—I am in the man’s power—completely in his power,” responded Green: “and now he’s making my life so wretched—oh! so wretched, that I think of running away to America with my two hundred pounds. But then I know that he would move heaven and earth to find me out; he would advertise me—give a description of my person—swear that I had robbed him, or something of that kind;—anything, indeed, would he do to revenge himself upon me. He is one of those despicable characters that cherish the bitterest—the most fiend-like malignity.”
“And what is he doing to you now?” demanded Jack, smoking his pipe at his ease while his friend was thus pouring forth his complaints.
“What doesn’t he do, you should rather ask me,” exclaimed Green, in a tone of mingled rage, hate, and despair. “As I just now told you, he put his brother Sir Gilbert into a lunatic asylum, in the hope of getting into his own hands the management of all the baronet’s property—and doubtless in the expectation likewise that grief would send the unfortunate gentleman to his last home. Well, Sir Gilbert escaped——”
“Through your connivance, eh?” interrupted the Doctor, with a knowing chuckle.
“Yes—with my connivance,” responded Green; “and it is the suspicion of this fact that makes Heathcote so intolerable in his conduct towards me. Besides, seeing me with a new suit of clothes, he swore that if I had not robbed him I must have been bribed to give information relative to the place where his brother was confined. It was all in vain that I reminded him of my salary being quite sufficient to keep me in decent attire——”